We are about halfway through David Stearns’ first (?) contract as President of Baseball Operations for the Mets. Stearns represents the third regime in the six seasons that mega-billionaire Steve Cohen has owned the Mets, after the ill-fated and very cancellable Jared Porter/Zack Scott/Sandy Alderson triumvirate and the Billy Eppler era that followed.
With the Mets in the middle of a teardown that figures to continue through the upcoming trade deadline, and probably well into the next offseason, it feels like a good time to review what Stearns has done and try and figure out where they might be going. Along the way, maybe we can figure out if Stearns is the right man for the job, or if there even is a right man for the job.
2023 Offseason
When Stearns took over after the 2023 season, the Mets had just completed a lousy season. They were 75-87 and finished 4th in the NL East, only 4 games ahead of the Washington Nationals. The team was dispirited and awful those last few months. I personally witnessed what may have been the nadir of that season, a 21-3 loss to Atlanta at home the day before my birthday. My friend Joe and I were able to get amazing seats for that game at a reasonable price because the team was dismal. Daniel Vogelbach, DJ Stewart, and Rafael Ortega were prominently involved in things. It was bleak.
I think if Stearns had completely cleaned house at this point, nobody would have blamed him. In 2022, they suffered a disappointing collapse to end the season. A surefire NL East championship was snatched away, and the team exited the playoffs in the Wild Card round with barely a whimper. In 2023, the team stunk. The core was starting to get old and hadn’t won anything. Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander, the Mets’ two big free agent signings for the 2022 and 2023 seasons, were traded off at the deadline.
We saw some mild housecleaning; Buck Showalter, who had won NL Manager of the Year only one year earlier, was shown the door. None of the major players were traded, though. I think we might have seen a more extensive teardown had Stearns had a bit more runway, but he had to install a new front office and coaching staff, and that took precedence over the big league roster.
They didn’t add anyone major, either. They made a play for Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who instead chose the Los Angeles Dodgers. After that, the Mets pivoted to smaller moves to fill the rotation, bringing in Luis Severino and Sean Manaea on low-risk deals to solidify the rotation. The biggest bats the Mets added were Harrison Bader and JD Martinez, also on low-risk, one-year contracts.
2024 Season
There was not a lot of optimism for the 2024 Mets. For the first 2 months of the season, the Mets lived down to those expectations. They were 24-35 through June 2. Francisco Lindor had his customary slow start. The starting pitching was nothing special, with 2023 ace Kodai Senga injured. It felt bleak, and with Pete Alonso almost certain to leave following the season, it felt like a deadline trade was inevitable.
Then the OMGrimace Mets happened.
The Mets went on an amazing run, finishing 65-38 to win the third and final wild card. Even more amazingly, they actually won a game in Atlanta, their house of horrors, in dramatic, come-from-behind fashion. Lindor rebounded to have one of the best seasons in team history and finished second in the MVP voting. Mark Vientos looked like one of the best young hitters in the sport.
They were down to their last out in the dreaded Wild Card round before Pete Alonso hit a dramatic go-ahead homer in the top of the ninth, in what could have been his last at-bat as a Met. In the NLDS, they defeated their rivals, the Philadelphia Phillies, finally exorcising some of the demons. They lost a spirited but inevitable series against the Dodgers in the NLCS, but it didn’t really matter. The team way exceeded expectations. They were fun and they were relevant. They were back!
And yet, that was the worst thing that could have happened to them.
Wait, what?
How could that be? How could a great season, a fun season, a dramatic season like 2024 ever be a bad thing? Isn’t that the type of thing we wait for as fans? The chance to root for a fun team, one that electrifies the city it plays in? Don’t we, as fans, yearn for the chance to talk about years like the one Lindor had, or to talk about the various cast of characters that came through our life that season?
And to be sure, we as fans should revere that team. It was incredible. I’ll always love that team.
But if they wanted to build a sustained winner, they needed a big shakeup. After such a fun season, it was impossible to blow up the core. The Mets have had some fun teams over the years: 1986, 1999, 2006, 2015, to name a few in my lifetime. But none of those teams were able to sustain winning for very long beyond those years. A team that exceeded expectations now had to commit to a core that hadn’t done much and was overmatched by the Dodgers. They were going to need a big move or two to try and sustain the momentum from 2024.
2024 Offseason
Stearns, to his credit, did make that big major move. He added Juan Soto to the team, the best left-handed hitter in baseball. He beat out the Yankees, Red Sox, and Dodgers to do it, which was particularly notable with Soto coming from the Yankees and just playing in the World Series with them. This was a major coup, their biggest signing since Carlos Beltran.
Manaea was brought back to anchor the rotation, and after a flirtation with Roki Sasaki ended with him signing with the Dodgers like Yamamoto before him, Stearns pivoted to bringing in Clay Holmes, Frankie Montas, and Griffin Canning as rotation depth. They even managed to re-sign Pete Alonso on a three-year contract with opt-outs after each season, something which once looked impossible.
2025 Season
And it almost worked again! The Mets started 45-24, looking like one of the best teams in the National League. They seemed like locks to win the NL East, and with the Dodgers disappointing at the start of the season, looked like a good bet to get that all-important first round bye.
Then Kodai Senga got hurt. Then Griffin Canning also got hurt. Sean Manaea and Frankie Montas seemingly never stopped being hurt. The bullpen imploded and was somehow made significantly worse with their deadline acquisitions of Ryan Helsley and Tyler Rogers. The Mets core started to look old both at the plate and particularly on the field, where the Mets fielded one of the worst defenses in the game. Vientos no longer looked like one of the best young hitters in baseball, even as Brett Baty showed some improvement.
The team sputtered out to a 38-55 finish, collapsing again like they did in 2007, 2008, and 2022, and missed out on the playoffs on the last day of the season after a particularly dispirited loss against the Miami Marlins. Pete Alonso couldn’t even exit the stadium before announcing he would be opting out of his contract for the 2026 season.
2025 Offseason
The Mets could no longer reasonably be considered a contender after playing at a 66-win pace down the stretch. Many of the longest-tenured players were sent off. Alonso was signed by the Baltimore Orioles without the Mets making so much as an offer. Brandon Nimmo, often injured and with five years remaining on his contract, was traded for Marcus Semien, an older player also on a bad contract, but one with two fewer seasons remaining. Jeff McNeil was traded for not much of anything at all.
They traded away Nimmo in part to open an outfield spot for top prospect Carson Benge. Another top prospect, Nolan McLean, was expected to be a big part of their rotation. The Mets also had Baty, Vientos, and Francisco Alvarez, younger players who had recently been top prospects themselves, and Ronny Mauricio waiting in the wings. The youth movement was under way.
But they also had Juan Soto on the team. It is hard to go into a rebuild when you have a star in his prime locked into contracts for 14 seasons, but one he could opt out of after the fifth season. If the team has another 4 seasons in the abyss, he will certainly opt out and take his talents elsewhere, especially if the Yankees, Dodgers, or Red Sox were in the mix again.
To try and compete, they traded two top prospects for Freddy Peralta, who received votes for NL Cy Young the previous season. Bo Bichette was signed to a three-year contract with opt-outs, similar to Pete Alonso the season before, though unlike Alonso, signing Bichette cost the Mets important draft capital in the MLB Draft. Jorge Polanco was signed in hopes of adding some athleticism to the Mets infield at first base, where Alonso looked terrible defensively the season before.
2026 Season
To be charitable, none of these moves have worked out, and to be less charitable, the 2026 Mets stink.
Semien is unplayable; his defense collapsed after two seasons of steep decline with the bat. Polanco has vacillated between being injured and being terrible at any given moment. Peralta has been so bad that the only good thing I can say about that move is that at least they misjudged their ability to extend him (which is a bad thing, don’t get me wrong, but is still preferable than paying him Max Fried money). Bichette has been so bad, it’s left me in the weird position where I have to root for him to play well enough that he might opt out of the final two years of his contract.
On top of these disappointing acquisitions, the Mets core has also battled injuries. Soto and Lindor will likely play fewer than 30 games together this season, as they have alternated being injured. On top of the injuries, Lindor is no longer one of the best players in baseball and hasn’t been good at all. Clay Holmes, the one 2025 acquisition other than Soto who has been good, injured his leg. Senga, once the team’s stop starter, is no longer a major league pitcher.
The one bright spot has been the play of the rookies. McLean looks like the real deal in the rotation. After a slow start, Benge looks like a guy, and AJ Ewing, brought up after Luis Robert Jr went on the injured list, looks like he might be a little better than that. That said, Baty and Vientos have been bad, and Alvarez will probably settle in as an average catcher, not the star he was projected to be. Nobody in the minor leagues has been impressive this season.
The result is a bad team, with a depleted farm system, struggling for relevance. They are in last place in the NL East and are one of the worst teams in the sport. There isn’t a lot of internal help coming, and they still have two stars signed to long-term deals, one of whom isn’t very good, and the other of whom is on the clock to opt out in three years. It’s not great, and Stearns gets a lot of blame for that. A lot of these bad acquisitions are his fault.
What could he have done? If the Mets had kept Nimmo, re-signed Alonso, and figured out something else at second while trading for Peralta, are the Mets a better team? I don’t think so. Nimmo and McNeil for Benge and Semien is a wash. Alonso has been a lot better than anything the Mets have cobbled together at first base, so maybe that gets them a couple of games in the standings, but it’s still a below .500 team.
I don’t think there was any one move, or any series of moves, that was getting the 2026 Mets into the playoff picture. Given that knowledge, the best thing they could do was avoid costly long-term contracts to non-stars. Clearing their books of the Nimmo contract two years early will help justify the lack of production from Semien, and not having to watch an unplayable Alonso in 2030 can help justify the poor, injury-riddled play of Polanco. Okay, the last one might be a stretch. I still wouldn’t want to be the team playing Pete Alonso to play baseball in 2030.
That’s why I feel like it’s hard to evaluate Stearns. This team needed to be torn down 3 years ago. It was delayed after 2023 because Stearns had just gotten here, and it was delayed after 2024 because the team played too well to blow it up. The one thing you can say about Stearns is that while many of his moves haven’t worked out, they haven’t added many years to their books, and he was able to subtract two years of a bad contract. The Mets are a high payroll team, but they only have two players signed after 2028. That flexibility will be important to future Mets teams.
Will Stearns be around to make those decisions? That’s tough to say. Part of that will depend on how he handles the rebuild. What will he get at the trade deadline for some of their moveable pieces like Brooks Raley, Tyrone Taylor, Freddy Peralta, Clay Holmes, Luis Robert Jr, or anyone else that they would be able to move. Will Francisco Lindor be on the 2027 Mets? Can Stearns rebuild a farm system that was considered one of the best in the game just a year ago, but has been depleted by promotions and stalled progress?
Stearns’ record is mixed. He absolutely gets credit for signing Soto, the first major free agent to come here in 20 years. The first Manaea deal was a good one, as was seeing starter potential in Holmes. Bichette, Polanco, Peralta, Montas, and Helsley were bad moves. Overall, I’d say it’s’ more bad moves than good, but that one good Soto move makes it close. He’s that good.
I’m a Mets fan. I want what every Mets fan wants but has never had; a sustained winner. The pattern for the Mets has been a few bad seasons, 1-2 good seasons, a slow come down, and then another few bad seasons. Wash, rinse, repeat. I’m tired of this endless cycle of mediocrity. This is a team that has never won back-to-back division titles. A team that has never made the playoffs more than two seasons in a row. A team that has won the NL East fewer times than the Pittsburgh Pirates.
It’s frustrating that we’re living through another rebuild, but this has been a team with deep organizational rot for decades. I think there were many of us who may not have been ready for that. This job is a difficult one. It would be easier to have faith in Stearns’ abilities if some of his recent moves had worked out. Where I’m at these days, I would say I have hope, but maybe not a ton of faith. He’s going to get at least two more trade deadlines and one more offseason to show some promise. Let’s see how it plays out.